Tag Archives: GMing

Redacted 3, Part 4a, GM Debrief

GM Confidence: 0/5. I consider this session a complete disaster, and an entirely preventable one, which makes it worse. There is an easily-followable chain-of-failures, leading from the very beginning of the session, to its premature, unceremonious end with a GM’s BSOD.

How have I failed thee? Let me count the ways…

I had a bad feeling about this one, but couldn’t quite put my finger on why, and I was sorely tempted to call it off. There were interruptions during the week that resulted in less available prep-time. I discovered a bad plot hole on Friday that I was frantically trying to resolve up to game-time; its weak-but-serviceable resolution left me with a false sense of security in having solved the problem, while all the other issues I had yet to identify remained unaddressed. This was one of the worst cases of GM “tunnel vision,” on my part, in the last decade or so, that I can recall. The following is a list of known fail-points in mostly-chronological order:

  • I had originally assumed the “entertainers” got around the ship via non-guest-accessible areas, but in the moment the magician was asked about alternative routes, I realized that if I gave the players that option, they would take it, and that would result in a small amount of chaos. So, I backed it off. No harm done.
  • The PCs’ reactions to being monitored by the security CCTV system was the first real issue to be revealed. It wasn’t just the fact that I didn’t know how many cameras were where, looking at what, or how one “sneaks” around them. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know, specifically, where the monitoring occurs, or how thoroughly—I had some educated guesses. It was in that moment that I realized the PCs would be walking right past where I thought that should have been, in the “office” area behind the bridge, and if the bad guys had smashed all the monitoring stations, I had no idea where they could have gone to continue monitoring—but it was now well-established that they were. Plot-hole discovered.
  • When the players also mentioned finding the security office and, not just shutting down the cameras, but possibly using them, I went white. Another plot hole, and a potentially serious one. (See below.)
  • I didn’t think about the PCs going back to their cabins, which meant I hadn’t given any consideration to their potential interactions with the NPCs there. GMing is all about improv, so I did what I could—could have been better, I suppose.
  • Due to the above point, I hadn’t considered PCs asking about Dalavi’s background, and his relationship with his wife. I hadn’t actually developed that well enough. Improv, again. I let the Universe decide about the situation with his wife.
  • I didn’t think about going outside the ship, to the bridge—this is really inexcusable, as I had considered just that for the set-piece fight at the Dalavi’s cabin. As a result, I hadn’t fetched the right images, nor considered the geography of the area, much less what it would take to navigate it, or what doors might be locked. This is a pretty common operation, though, so we know how to wing-it. (I discovered afterward that I got the geography a bit wrong—but near enough.)
  • I didn’t consider someone (specifically, Zoltar—who else?) might go onto the bridge alone, meaning that first encounter with the 3rd Officer possibly wouldn’t be witnessed by all. I also didn’t consider him working his way past the windows, where he could see right into the offices, which I had presumed to house the security monitoring stations. Not a big deal, I guess.
  • Another moment of temporary insanity: At the moment the words were about to come out of my mouth, I realized that if the 3rd Officer was in the bathroom during the whole takeover situation on the bridge, he would have no idea where the bad guys had gone when they left. This meant the PCs would be floundering around trying to guess, now that I had said all the monitors were smashed. More improv—I had to let them see the hostages at the pool area without revealing too much. I had given no thought whatsoever to things like “zoom,” and “pan” capabilities.
  • What made the previous point worse: at the very moment I told the players what they could see on the pool deck, I realized full consequence of the PCs’ having access—my carefully planned, cleverly hidden ambush would likely be in plain sight to the wide-angle cameras. I heard myself saying “you see nothing” while my brain was frantically trying (and failing) to figure out a way for that to be true. This was the point where things truly started to unravel.
  • At some point, I threw out that the bad guys might have repurposed the media center as a monitoring station—I had seen this place in a tour video—I didn’t consider that they might make going there a high-priority agenda item. Of course, I had only a vague idea where it might be, if it was even suitable for that purpose. I was fortunate they decided to sort out the hostages first.
  • Now that the PCs were on the bridge, they had access to full deck plans—I knew this because I had seen it in some videos of bridge-tours within the 24 hours leading up to game-time (which I really needed to have seen much earlier). That meant they had full knowledge of the back areas of the ship. And if Zoltar taking snapshots of the plans weren’t enough, I realized they have a bloody “tour guide” now, with the 3rd Officer. Of course, I have been virtually unable to find any sort of diagram of what those areas look like, or how one gets around them, up to this point.
  • Of course the PCs would decide to take the back-way to reach the Deck 11 pool area. Fine. I could just fast-forward them to their exit—they don’t need the details, really—but I wasn’t really certain what exits were actually available, though I had a vague notion or two. (As a result, they didn’t come out in quite the right place, but I can correct that later.)
  • To be fair, I was pretty flustered already, by this point, given all the crap that preceded. But once the PCs got to Deck 11, the whole thing started to collapse. It’s not that they were expecting an ambush—I figured that would be the case. But I had gotten a little confused around the geography, and was expecting them to emerge somewhat closer to the main pool area. I had them much farther back, which meant my carefully-planned, cleverly-hidden ambush was going to be compromised. Then it got worse when they started talking about Mayhem going up a level to Deck 12 to scout around for a sniper position—in which case, he was highly-likely to end up on top of part of the ambush, neverminding causing some other tactical issues. For whatever insane, inexcusable reason, that had not occurred to me whatsoever.

After all that, my brain was just overloaded with cognitive dissonance, and the circuit-breaker was finally tripped. We took an intermission, which has sometimes been enough for me to regain my footing, but at that moment, I could not in any way arrive at an acceptable solution. The very thing that would have filled this set-piece fight with escalated tension would be utterly nullified, as the PCs leisurely sidled up behind the ambushers and murdered them, entirely unaware. To just move forward with it as-is would have been utterly boring, but I didn’t have time to reconfigure. So, for the first time in multiple decades (I think?), I had to cut the session short, because the players “broke the GM”—or, if I’m honest, the GM broke himself; I just let the players hold the hammer. It will go down in my GMing history amongst the other spectacular failures I’ve had to learn from.

After an extra-long night of rest and a long shower the next morning, I had already worked through all the problems—maybe 75-85% anyway. But that will have to wait until next week.

Redacted 3, Part 3, GM Debrief

Stream

GM Confidence: 4.5/5. I’d say this session went about as well as I could reasonably expect, especially given the struggle it required to see production.

In Between

As I was processing what the PCs might do in the wake of the last session, I realized I had absolutely no idea what one might do with “the doctor” in a situation like this. There’s no way off the ship. There’s nowhere to hide, really. The best I could come up with was to relocate him to a room the bad guys had already “processed,” hoping they wouldn’t return to re-check. I was prepared to have the wife suggest this, if needed; fortunately, the players arrived at more-or-less the same idea on their own.

Carrying on with the “railroading” I mentioned last time: I knew that what they’d really want is to go after the helicopter (which turned out to be correct). I knew where I wanted to send the PCs. I wasn’t able to come up with a better plan to get them there other than to rely on the players to “play along”—something I normally do not in any way recommend (but this campaign is a particular exception). So, I left a suggestion (via radio) that the helicopter was “unimportant,” and used the NPC, Bob, to leave a clue pointing toward the theater. Weak, but sufficient for them to pick up on the not-so-subtle direction, which, thankfully, they followed.

The Rescue

Especially in the early years, as I have often lamented, attendance problems were the bane of my GM existence. One of the ways I’ve learned to cope is the cunning use of narrative devices that “allow” for a player’s untimely absence within the story. In this case, I announced to the players during the Session Zero that the character of anyone who missed a session would be unceremoniously captured by the enemy as “punishment” (tongue-in-cheek of course).

I have to admit that, naïvely, I didn’t actually think it would happen. But, in this session, it did. So, how to work that into the narrative? I ultimately decided “simple is best”: have the PCs stumble across him in-transit, and he has no memory of how he got into that position. I really wanted the PCs to be taking the elevator down, so I could have the comedic doors-open-surprise-reveal, but I had to settle for second-best. The fight itself wasn’t meant to last long, and it didn’t—a testament to the potential lethality of a “focused” 250CP character group.

Off-screen, Mayhem picked up an Idiot Ball and got knocked on the head, drugged, and dragged off. Once back in play, his “punishment” consisted of the tipsy condition (B428), which I kept forgetting about, and a little “wandering damage.”

The Theater

I’ve been gradually increasing the number of opponents in the set-piece fights, feeling out the right balance. In this instance, though, I wanted to give them the opportunity to reach out from the shadows a bit—a proper Mook Horror Show. I’m also still trying to figure out how to make this “Quick Time” idea work, and this was an ideal spot for it. Unfortunately to that end, due to a combination of miscommunication and impulsiveness, Mayhem’s player “went loud” ahead of schedule, and we went into regular Combat Time instead. The PCs were outnumbered 2:1, but I had expected half of those to be eliminated before combat-proper began. I had another four waiting in the back-rooms in case they were a little too successful at the start—they weren’t needed. Even with their numbers and armaments, they were apparently at a significant disadvantage. That 2:1 fight took around an hour and twenty minutes—not bad, actually.

I finally got a “proper” cliffhanger. The idea came at the last minute, as they often do. But this one is going to lock me into a particular narrative direction for next week. All good.

Miscellaneous

  • Fantasy Grounds did a big update, which wrecked parts of the GURPS skin, so I had to spend prep-time fixing things; the new 3D-map feature is not something I expect to use, but then I said the same of the animated maps, so we’ll see…
  • I’ve been using BAD (Action2 p.4) more than previous games of mine; it occurred to me that using BAD “Universe Reaction” rolls made sense, so I implemented that here for the first time
  • Wagering was under-used again; it may take some time for folk to get used to the idea—probably just after the last session 😛
  • I realized the day after that I missed an opportunity in not casting Chris Tucker in the “magician” role—that would have been perfect 😛
  • I had lampshaded the “doves” in the first session—a John Woo homage. This won’t be the last time.
  • The boss, and the two mini-bosses have now been (mostly) introduced

Redacted 3, Part 2, GM Debrief

Stream

GM Confidence: 4.5/5. This session went way better than the last one. There were some rough edges, as usual, but nothing disastrous. Due to the “simplified” nature of this run, there’s actually not a lot to talk about when things go smoothly.

What Went Right

The nature of this campaign means the connecting tissue of the story is less than important. I decided that “railroading,” which I normally take pains to avoid, is a perfectly acceptable motivational mechanism in this case. I used the “radio” to get the PCs to the first fight of the two, and the “doctor” to get them to the next one—a simple, logical progression. And I don’t feel bad about it 😛

Two fights in one session is tricky; a single fight can take up most of a four-hour session sometimes. For one, I had fewer PCs for this session, which would make it a little faster. For two, I intended the first fight to be extra short, so I put the PCs in a position where they could get the jump on the bad guys. As such, I didn’t really plan for a midpoint-twist or anything flashy. It partially worked, though it took a bit longer than I intended. I planned to do it “mapless” but reflexively ended up using one anyway—a mistake that probably dragged things out longer than needed. The second fight was the intended set-piece for the session, but ended a little shorter—which actually worked out. In both cases, that one round of Do Nothing, due to Partial Surprise, was a killer for the bad guys, and could easily have been much worse if they didn’t have Combat Reflexes.

What Went…Weird

The lead-in to the first fight was a little clunky, once again, due to the not-quite combat timing—I really need a better solution for this. I fault myself for not putting in the work (by design) and really thinking through the narrative flow. I was better prepared for the second, at least.

The players surprised me in both cases. I hadn’t considered making a Molotov Cocktail at all—bad GM! I hadn’t expected Shredder’s player to “test the boundaries” by trying to hit all three bad guys at the bar at once, and it resulted in some rules mistakes. (I nailed it down later for future reference: Rapid Strike and Dual-Weapon Attack can not be combined, and Rapid Strike is not allowed for a Move and Attack.) Then there was Shredder’s “Crotch-of-Death” flying-scissors attack at the end, which I had no idea how to adjudicate at that moment. Fortunately, another player was handy with the lookups while I was trying to sort these things out, and came up with some answers I could use. I look forward to creative solutions, though I wish I were better prepared sometimes. That’s GMing.

Miscellaneous

  • The capture-team at the bar in the first fight should have approached “deceptively,” leaning on their supposed authority with these “random guests,” rather than approaching guns-out—this would have changed the flavor of the situation somewhat
  • I couldn’t quite formulate the words at the time, but: I know the cabins can be “deadlocked” from inside, and I suspect they can be unlocked as such from the outside (would be dangerous otherwise), but being able to lock it from the outside, such that the occupants couldn’t open it from the inside, is highly unlikely IRL—but this is cinematic!
  • Shredder’s slide-door at the cabin should probably have been too heavy to manipulate like that IRL—but this is cinematic!
  • I decided, in the moment, that Shredder’s door “opponent” would use All-Out Attack to kick the door back. It was somewhat logical given he had the door as cover, and needed the extra assurance it would hit. But the use of All-Out has always been a little weird—bad guys should make mistakes, but as a GM who is also a player much of the time, it’s hard to “let go”

Redacted 3, Part 1, GM Debrief

Stream

GM Confidence: 3.5/5. Some good. Some bad. I would say it was a disappointingly sloppy start, but not an utter failure.

Pregame

For a campaign designed specifically to reduce my usual workload, it certainly involved a lot of prep-work. Fortunately, a lot of that was up-front, and I won’t have to do it again, excepting some cleanup here and there. As usual, I was scrambling up to the last minute, getting graphics together and re-writing notes. On top of that, we got off to a really late start due to some scheduling issues, and we ran late to compensate, which may have turned out to be somewhat of a mistake. But we did get in a couple of practice combat sessions with the characters (in their unfinished state) in the weeks leading up, which smoothed things out a bit when the fighting started.

The First Half

The first half or so was all setup. This is typical. Aside from the obvious purpose of orienting the players, it gives me a chance to re-acclimate myself to my role—I tend to go for rather long periods, sometimes years, between runs. That part went well enough.

I expected that the “unusual” concept, the wagering of Bennies, would garner less than full participation, and that was the case. But one bet was placed, at least, and paid out in hilarious fashion. I expect that, for the next session, there will be a little more activity to that end, now that they’ve seen it work. But it would help to put some more ideas out there, and I need to pre-plan the odds for some likely scenarios. I decided at the last minute not to give out a free Benny “for wagering purposes only”—I didn’t feel like it would really help. So far, so good.

The Second Half

When we finally got to the meat-and-potatoes of the evening’s entertainment is the time when it all started to unravel.

For starters, I didn’t think through the lead-in well enough. As a result, the timing got a little weird: Is this combat-turns or not? How much time has passed? How far did they move? At least there are two PCs with Impulsive who made predicting their responses fairly easy, so I didn’t have to twist their arms to get them involved.

The real problem was the map, or lack thereof. I was starting to realize my error while I was dealing with the aforementioned “timing” issues. This was the one set-piece fight I could guarantee would occur, and I knew that from a very early stage. I had been thinking, for the months leading up, that I really needed to scrutinize the intended combat area and figure out what I needed to do with the mapping. I didn’t. I’m not sure why. It turned out I also could have benefited from having some additional images of the scene on hand, to give the players a better understanding of the geography—I had plenty. This mistake resulted in a last-minute, half-assed attempt to paint the picture well enough the players could understand. I suppose the attempt succeeded well enough, but it could—should—have been much better.

The fight itself actually went pretty well, overall. But since we’d run late, I had to wrap things in a spot I hadn’t intended, and with my brain somehow addled by the late hour (I guess?), I just couldn’t process how to close it out properly, and made a right mess of it. Honestly, I should’ve taken a short break before closing it out, to give my brain a chance to catch up.

Even so, it wasn’t all bad. Here are some highlights:

  • I was really happy with how the characters turned out; there is enough variation to set them apart, and it was fun to watch them do their thing—they each got their chance to shine. I did notice how they managed to cover for each other without really “planning” to—good teamwork.
  • I finally got that “proper” use of Fantastic Dungeon Grappling, and it actually went pretty smoothly, no doubt, due to the test-fights we did on previous nights.
  • They went through quite a few Bennies in this one; that might come back to bite them as the BAD gets higher.
  • I put the last bad guy in the lifeboat overhead as a midpoint twist, which was fine, but I really didn’t think through when he should appear, so he showed up a bit late.
  • There was only one instance of a player throwing the “this is supposed to be cinematic!” flag; better than I expected 😛
  • The players seemed to like the Achievements. I’ve got over a dozen currently lined up, most of which I have graphics for. I’ll add more as I think of them (assuming I have the brain-cycles to spare).

Introduction to GURPS Action: Redacted

History

As was stated numerous times with regard to my previous run of Sea Dogs, my workload at work over the last year or two has increased uncomfortably, to the detriment of my ability to effectively run a “normal” RPG campaign. This remains the case, though maybe I’m in a bit of a very-welcome lull at the moment. But GMing is a part of me that I can’t quite turn off, and we’re a bit short on GMs at the moment. So, I needed something I could reliably manage in this hostile environment—the less “work” required, the better. I tossed around a couple of ideas for a while. But while I was on a cruise vacation at the end of October ’23—first time since before the Plague of 2020—I came up with the idea of having some terrorists attempt a takeover of a cruise ship, and loose some fully-cinematic Action PCs upon them in that enclosed environment. It’s about as simple as you can get: create some generic bad-guys, and some set-piece fights, loosely-connected with some basic plot stuff that doesn’t really matter—no need for it to “make sense.” As close to perfect as I could hope for, I think.

Campaign Overview

Basics

“Keep It simple!” Basically, it’s an ’80s/’90s action movie in a modern setting (I toyed around with making it a “period piece”). Die Hard on a Cruise Ship. I’m shooting for True Lies level of cinematicness—still kinda ridiculous, but somewhat more “grounded” than its ’80s forebears. Owing to some lessons learned last run, I’m going to make this a short one—I’m planning for six sessions, though it could easily go a little long without too much additional stress. The plan is to do around one hour of in-game time passage per session, so the whole thing will take place within six-or-so hours.

Through a combination of Discord and a Session Zero, the players and I agreed on the parameters and rules to be used (or excluded). We settled on the name, Redacted 3. The PCs would be a group of former quasi-governmental assassins now in various stages of retirement, temporarily reassembled to honor their fallen, beloved mentor, by scattering his ashes on the sea, while on an otherwise-real cruise vacation. The events of the previous “movies” (Redacted 1 and 2 don’t actually exist 😛 ) and any other of their former associations are a Noodle Incident. The bad guys are going to be typical, generic Islamic terrorists—I’m ripping off the Crimson Jihad from True Lies as if those events “actually” happened 20 years ago.

Characters

The PCs were all generated using the standard Action templates, with the usual tweaking; they come with all the included cinematic abilities that are going to make it really hard to take them down—which is fine. Restrictions were placed on the availability of Disadvantages, understandably, to make sense within the short in-game timeframe and single-location. They will each be known only by their codenames (with one exception), which are taken from ’70s/’80s/’90s cartoon villains. They will be starting with no gear whatsoever—they’re on vacation, not a mission—and wealth will be irrelevant; weapons will need to be taken from the enemy or the environment.

Rules and Experiments

  • We’ll use Tactical Combat with the usual attention to detail; that is, not 100% strictly observed—maybe 75%-85%.
  • The overall “cinematic” level I’m intending is not one I’ve had to adjudicate before, with the very-brief exception of the Knight City one-shots. I expect I will have to be reminded from time to time to let things slide.
  • Basic Abstract Difficulty (BAD; from Action 2 Exploits) will be used throughout. The plan is to start at zero for the first session and increase by one-per-session—probably capped at 4 (situationally or globally—or a bit of both).
  • This campaign will make full use of Fantastic Dungeon Grappling. This won’t be the first of my campaigns to officially feature FDG, but it may be the first where it actually gets used—at least for the first engagement (given the PCs’ lack of equipment).
  • Bennies are once again making an appearance in this campaign. I’ve been pretty happy with how they’ve worked out so far.
  • Given the in-game timeframe, spending character points for advancement seems a little weird. We’re going to defer CP awards until the end of the run, but I’m planning to give out per-session Bennies instead. That said, we’ve recently “discovered” the rule on B292 regarding the “IQ roll to see whether you learned from your experience” after using a skill at default—I’ll allow the borrowing of CPs from the end of the run in these cases.
  • Another consequence of the in-game timeframe is “healing”: that is, healing probably isn’t going to happen much, so they may be stuck with injuries for the duration. This is totally in keeping with the source material, of course. But with the PCs’ abilities, and the use of Bennies, I expect this won’t be such a big deal.
  • Meta Experiment: I’m going to be allowing the wagering of Bennies, versus the “house” or between individuals—for things like “who gets injured first,” or “who gets the first crit roll,” and the like. It’s actually not a new idea for me, but this will be the first time it will see production. Whether or not the players actually do make use of it is another matter, and will tell me how viable this sort of thing might be in the future. If it goes well, it may warrant a future blog post regarding the details; if it doesn’t, I’ll probably forget it ever happened 😛
  • Meta Experiment: Achievements—I’ve got a bunch in mind, a few of which I’ll inform the players of beforehand, with the rest kept secret. The idea is to give a Benny any time someone triggers one.

In Closing (or Opening?)

If this ends up fitting my workload the way I intend, I expect a sequel or two in the future—optimistic as it is to say at this point. Worst-case: We get some interesting and/or entertaining fights in, and learn some stuff in the process. I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Sea Dogs Chapter II, GM Retrospective

Overall

On the surface, at least, I think this season went pretty well. Is it better or worse than season one?—even a month or so later, I’m not quite sure. I reached my ultimate story milestone, one twenty years in the making. Mistakes were made, as usual, but none of them were unrecoverable. I feel like I have advanced my abilities as a GM, even if I learned some lessons later than I’d like. Even so, it was the greatest struggle I can recall behind the Big Screen, and one I’ll be in no great hurry to repeat.

The Elephant-in-the-Room

I officially announced the campaign in August of ’22, expecting to run late in the year. But the holiday season caused its usual delays, and the previous campaign ran a little long. Then there were some scheduling issues with some of the players after the holidays, and I didn’t want to start without a full house. Ultimately, we didn’t end up starting until the beginning of February—a nearly six month lead time. In itself, this isn’t a big deal.

During that time, though, the pressure at work got ramped up to eleven, depleting my motivation to work on the campaign when I would finally get home for the day. I knew this was a recipe for disaster, and I nearly called off the campaign a week or two before it started, for “mental health” reasons—maybe I should have?

As the campaign progressed, the work situation fluctuated, but on average, never truly “improved.” There were more player scheduling issues than with Season One, but I was glad of the more-frequent breaks when they came. Starting the last quarter, when I generally start to break down anyway, I struggled so hard to get the Season wrapped up satisfactorily that I canceled Session Nine in the (literal) last minutes so I’d have an extra week or two to make it right—it was this delay that caused me to have to end the campaign short of the intended twelve sessions. All told, there were four months of the campaign run, plus the six month run-up, which adds up to having spent nearly a year with a (figurative) gun to my head. In the end, while I felt pretty good about the results, I can’t help but wonder if it might have been a little better, overall, without the additional strain on my sanity.

Lessons Learned

Firstly—and I don’t know that I’ve learned this one yet—I need to read through my previous run’s GM reviews to remind myself of the lessons I learned last time. I keep discovering I had already come to this-or-that realization last time, and forgotten about it. Learn from history or you’re doomed to repeat it… 😛

The next lesson, which I am still learning: I have continued to feel dissatisfied with the social encounters as I’ve run them, and I have continued to iterate through different methods of better handling them. The last idea was the “Lock & Key” concept, which still has merit, but I’ve found I haven’t really used it in actual play—it doesn’t flow naturally in the moment. Once again inspired by screenwriting advice, unfortunately a bit late in the campaign, I arrived at the current “Attack & Defend” concept, which seemed to work much better. It needs some more polish, but this is the direction I will push in the future. I won’t go into a lot of detail here—it’s worth its own article later.

Also still in-progress: I’ve continued to try to implement the “prep situations, not plots” concept. In this campaign, I have also been focused on the idea that each of these situations needs to revolve around a decision for the character(s) to make, which needs to be clearly-defined, and have meaningful consequences (and where appropriate, a proper sense of urgency). I’ve applied this thinking to social encounters, the various chases, as well as expanding combat (though those were few in number). I feel like this is definitely the right way to go, and I feel like it worked well in this campaign (when I got it right, anyway). It is difficult, however, to apply this concept to the “crunchy travel bits.” There are a lot of little decisions to make, which should be elevated beyond triviality—like merely which skill to roll against—but their importance can often be vague or obscured, and as such, the segment can feel like a meaningless slog. This I do not have an answer to, yet.

The Big One: It is known in TTRPG circles that you always end up GMing the campaign you actually want to play in (because no one else usually will). There were grumblings about some of my intended features of this campaign even before it kicked off—in fact, those grumblings caused Season One to be delayed by a year. Those grumblings returned during the course of Season Two, despite having been mostly smoothed over before. Given the combination of those two elements, I now find myself affirming that not everyone actually enjoys this sort of campaign. Most enjoy it “enough,” and/or tolerate the bits they don’t like, however, some have vocalized their dislikes enough that it’s affected whether or not I want to continue running these kinds of campaigns. Taking away the slice-of-life sailing elements from this one turns it into an altogether different thing, resulting in the need for drastic structural changes to continue it.

Other Stuff

  • This was my second “season two” for the Olympus group
  • This was my first campaign to use the new Fantasy Ground Unity, to which I say…actually not bad. I still have some lesser complaints, but I wasn’t held back by the software in any way I can recall, and in some instances, I’d say the experience was enhanced.
  • There were a number of research questions I was finally able to answer during the course of this campaign, like how much the port fees and tariffs were, and how smuggling worked at the time.
  • This campaign mostly revolved around two big set-pieces: Havana and Campeche, which took up most of the play-time. Now that it’s done, I can’t help but feel like this “sailing” campaign didn’t need rather more actual sailing in it.
  • One of the great successes of this run, I think, is the continued improvement in the employment of the “crew” NPCs as active participants in the story, though other campaigns of mine, so far, haven’t had as much use for that sort of thing. The idea of treating recurring NPCs as “campaign” (as opposed to “character”) Contacts, though, will definitely see exploration in the future.

To Be Continued?

There would be a lot of character turnover for a prospective season three: Davino’s player is out (temporarily?), and we’ve been playing with a new guy lately. I felt like Roger’s replacement player needed to make his own, so Rogers would likely be out. This sort of thing makes it difficult to continue the existing campaign as-is.

That said, I’ve also been rethinking how I run things—as discussed above—and the overall “style” of this campaign is probably something I will be avoiding in the future. Plus I find myself needing to streamline the pregame process as much as possible, as I have little time for the necessary leg-work these days. All that to say: I may not return to this campaign after all, which will truly be a shame. If I do, it definitely won’t be soon—I need a damned break 😛

Sea Dogs, Chapter II:XI, GM Debrief

GM Confidence: 3.5/5. This session, the season (and maybe campaign) finale, had the potential to be great, but for all the shouldadones that came immediately to mind afterward.

Full of Regrets

We got off to a late start in the first place, and with the hard-stop at the end, and no session twelve for overflow, compromises were inevitable. I had some combat planned, but I knew we wouldn’t have time for it.

  • The crew of La Dame Blanche was supposed to go into the Treasury with the PCs but I screwed that up: they arrived on the scene late, got left behind, and then I kinda “forgot they were there” until afterward. So, technically, they’re stuck in the hole with the PCs, having explored the caves a little in their absence, trying to find a way in.
  • I didn’t consider whether or not the small “treasure box” would appear on the “other side” with the PCs until someone brought it up.
  • I had expected all the players to voluntarily fail the initial Will check and was taken aback a little when they didn’t—I probably should have worded that differently.
  • I knew the shadowy figures would press the PCs forward, but I didn’t actually think about the “details” of that process—could have been more effective.
  • I missed some bits of Reade’s monologue.
  • I had other “incidents” planned in the Maze that might have been a bit more…dynamic, but I had to truncate.
  • I had intended for the shadow-figures to catch up in the treasure room and do a little combat there.
  • The “druid water” coincidence came completely out of left-field—but to be fair, there was no way to have been prepared for that.
  • I realized, in the moment that Payne (PC and his player) was flailing for a clue in the treasure chamber, that I hadn’t actually defined the conditions under which the “hall” would be revealed. I was lucky he decided to “call Reade out” like he did, which gave me a way out.
  • On the other hand, given I didn’t know about the “calling out” before it happened, I didn’t think through the potential consequences of having Reade in the hall. I had considered Davino might shoot the statue, but Reade wasn’t actually supposed to be there. I toyed with the idea of having it not work—there was justification—but the time crunch caused me to back off.
  • Boissonade was supposed to discover Boulet and his journal, so he could confirm it was the original, and the copy was a forgery.
  • I meant to review the PCs’ Move scores before the game and calculate the “collapse” timing a little more thoroughly. As it was, I had factored in maybe a three-second delay, but not eight, which at the time of execution, I thought was too far for it to catch them up. After the game, Spenser’s player calculated it, and discovered he might not have made it, if it had played out normally. In any case, in the heat of the moment, I didn’t like the clumsy way I was handling the movement, and I just let it go. This segment is probably my biggest regret of them all.
  • I completely forgot to reveal that Reade had the Steward’s brand on his chest. I also meant for him to catch fire from within, which would have eliminated the need for “medical attention.”

Not All Bad

  • I do think I achieved the supernatural “look and feel” I was going for.
  • At least some of the PCs failed that initial Will check, voluntarily or otherwise, and the confused fighting of each other worked out nicely—I had just intended that effect to be a little more widespread.
  • The session ended pretty much as I had intended, on a nice, solid cliffhanger.

Sea Dogs, Chapter II:X, GM Debrief

GM Confidence: 4/5. I actually felt pretty good about this one, in the end. Thanks to the two-week delay, I wasn’t under-prepared this time, though that delay comes with some unfortunate consequences.

Delays

This session was supposed to have happened two weeks prior, and it nearly did. I had warned everyone that this was a bad time for me to be GMing, and that assertion was definitely accurate. Work has been…more work than usual, of late, which is never conducive to good gaming prep, for a variety of reasons. A (becoming “predictable”) late-campaign stress breakdown (aggravated by work conditions) undermining my confidence in the material I had prepared, and a broken air-conditioner in the apartment on a hot game day, caused me to falter in the (literal) last minutes, and postpone. I was already going to be out the following week to attend my son’s college graduation, delaying the session further. Anyway, I completely unplugged from the campaign for (most of) the first week, and got back to it with a good head-start on the next. But the delay(s) pushed the campaign further toward summer, and after some discussion, we decided I had better wrap it up early. Therefore, the campaign will end on session eleven—greatly offending my (quasi-)OCD.

Risks and Manipulations

I knew this session was going to consist almost-entirely of a wilderness travel segment. I didn’t want to stretch it out too far, as it is “filler” after all, if I’m honest. But I did want the players to feel like they’d “earned” their success when they reached the Treasury, so it needed some teeth.

I realized somewhat late in the process (as usual) that a big problem with the content I had was lack of real consequences for and/or chance of failure during the trek into the jungle. There were things happening, but success was more-or-less assumed. Real consequences are what separate boredom from edge-of-your-seat anticipation—it’s worth its own article, and might get one at some point. Given the lateness, I didn’t have much time to re-engineer things, but what I could do is “fake it” a little.

A GM’s psychological manipulation of the Players is not just acceptable, but an essential part of the GM’s toolset (not to mention other literary applications, in general). You probably do it all the time without realizing it. In this session, my attempt to manipulate the players was quite deliberate:

  • I decided to clarify all the potential risks before the characters set out, just to place them at the forefront of their minds. Likewise, I encouraged the players to ponder what might cause them to turn back. A consequence doesn’t have to be “real” to be effective, though in this case, I did give a thought to what I might do in the highly unlikely event they did decide to turn back. Ideally, I would rather deliver this sort of thing in-game, through NPCs or whatnot, rather than via GM exposition, but it was all I had at the time.
  • The use of the actor from Predator as the guide got the players expecting a “creature” to be lurking in the jungle—also the later “staring into the jungle” incident, another movie callback.
  • Like with the “dinner” in session 8, I used a “combat” map to set up the marching order. This served multiple purposes: to get the players paranoid about an ambush, which was later justified; to set up “social geography” for conversations; and to work around the limitation with the built-in “marching order” panel in Fantasy Grounds, which doesn’t allow you to add “non-combatants.”
  • Knowing there’s another party out there “racing” for the prize, and that they might have a shortcut/advantage, got the players thinking about trying to keep things moving quickly.
  • Losing some porters along the way helped to get them wondering if they’d be able to complete the mission (especially if they lost more)
  • Building up the guide, and then taking him away suddenly, is a trick I’ve used before to ramp up tension (a really long time ago)

And the Rest

The session focused a lot on Sir Randel—I usually try to avoid focusing too much on one character, but this is the climax of his story, so I thought it was warranted. I ended about where I expected/wanted, but I had to cut some corners to get there: using Sir Randel’s Intuition without his player’s asking for it, and using a Universe Reaction roll basically like Luck—a clumsy solution in the heat-of-the-moment. The next session is the “money shot” of the campaign, so I really need to get that one right.

Miscellaneous

  • I don’t think I fully realized how much medical gameplay was going to be involved until game-time
  • I pre-rolled the results of the ambush, since I knew where/when it would go off—no reason to roll all that out in the moment if you don’t have to
  • After the assassination attempt, there was a big miscommunication about what had been observed where. As a result, everyone went to the top of the cenote, where nothing had happened, to look for clues. Afterward, I think maybe they had assumed he had fallen from the top, into the water? I know I didn’t say that, though. I had to fudge some stuff there at the last second, so I’m not surprised it went a little askew, and the misunderstanding threw me off a little.
  • I tried a new technique for handling the social issues—specifically interrogations here—based on the concept that each party should always be “attacking” or “defending”; basically, I defined the bad guys’ “defense strategy” and used that to guide their responses. I think I like these results better than previous attempts, but I need to process it a bit more.

Sea Dogs, Chapter II:IX, GM Debrief

GM Confidence: 3.5/5. I’m really conflicted about this session. On the one hand, I was severely under-prepared—the worst yet—and the session was a bit of a mess, behind the scenes, as a result. On the other hand, it ended up where I wanted it, overall, and was enjoyable.

Mistakes were made…

The combat encounter

I was having a monumentally hard time getting motivated to work on the campaign this week—I’m clearly hitting the point of burnout. At any rate, I decided to kick it off with the combat meant to end the last session—a legitimate decision on its own merits, though I knew it would take up a big chunk of the session, leaving me with less to plan for afterward.

Even though Davino’s player was out this week, Davino needed to report on his encounter with the Rokea at the end of last session, so I had a moment reserved for it. It was very late—that is, early Saturday, a few hours before the game—that it occurred to me that it would make more narrative sense to begin with that segment, rather than have the PCs fetched to him after the combat. I failed to think through the potential consequences, for instance, what might happen if any of the PCs decided not to go back to the hacienda… When Rogers’ player did just that, it threw me completely: One man short in the combat would mean they would be more seriously outnumbered, so I’d need to scale back the opposition. Scaling back the PCs and the opposition meant the fight would take less time than I had allotted. Leaving that PC out of the fight meant the player would be thumb-twiddling on the sideline for the duration, and I hadn’t prepared a surrogate. Had I more time, I might have come up with a way to get them all to the hacienda, together. After a brief recess, I couldn’t come up with a better plan, so I decided to just lay back and let it happen. Despite some minor technical oopses, the combat went entertainingly enough, though not so much for Rogers’ player, I expect.

Operational Security (OPSEC)

Again—I didn’t realize until too late that we had not had any sort of discussion of whether or not the Expedition would be maintaining any level of secrecy regarding their situation. This was fine, up to the point where they really needed to cooperate with someone, and I started to struggle, trying to nudge them in the direction I was better prepared for—which is always bad a GM move. I was fortunate, as I suspect the players may have picked up on this fact (subconsciously, maybe), and helped keep things on track.

The Hunt

At some point, when I started to tally the progress of the PCs’ (unwitting?) investigation, I wanted to be able to tell them what they had deduced, but it hadn’t occurred “naturally” at the time. For some reason, I started asking questions in a clumsy attempt to get them across that line. I really don’t know what possessed me to do this, and I knew it was a bad move as the words were coming out of my mouth. I’m sure the players were scratching their heads, wondering what that was about. I just moved on and pretended it didn’t happen—there was a bit too much of this in this session 😛 Regardless, as it stands at the end of the session, they have more-or-less successfully deduced all but one of the questions: Where (that is, where the bad guys were hiding out)—which they don’t need unless they intended to actually hunt them down.

Anyway…

Other than that, it actually went pretty well, I thought. I ended up adding a day to the layover time at the end, because it made sense to do so, even though that wasn’t part of the plan. But it did allow me to have Hayden make his Death roll before they stepped out, and the results…well, it was bound to happen. (I realized afterward that, although we had discussed an auto-death on a Critical Failure at some point, it wasn’t what was written down, and therefore, what was agreed to. So, we’ll have to “clarify” next time.) Now, I have three more sessions left, so I’ve got to find that motivation somewhere, and get the photo-finish the season deserves. Meanwhile, I’ve got a plot-hole or two to fill.

Miscellaneous

  • Both Claude’s and Davino’s players were out this week, so a chunk of content intended for them has to be delayed (more)—I may be doing a little catch-up next week.
  • The original plan for the combat, here, was a simple “lone assassin enters each room” bit, but I thought that would be a little boring; “arson” felt a little more like a terror-attack, and would avoid less combat-oriented characters from getting out of their depth, plus adding to Ned Long’s modus operandi worked nicely with the overall narrative. The risk of fire, and slippery surfaces, added to the overall difficulty without raising the bad guys’ skill levels.
  • I’ve had a hard time finding where GURPS has any information on putting out fires, but I finally located something usable in GURPS Vehicles (3e) p. 185, and the bottom of the sidebar—not that I ended up needing it
  • I still don’t have a solution for handling “social encounters” (like interrogations) in a manner I’m satisfied with, but I keep trying to find one

Sea Dogs, Chapter II:VIII, GM Debrief

GM Confidence: 4/5. Saying “I was under-prepared” is becoming a trope, I think, but it was definitely true in this case. That said, it went pretty well overall, and ended right where I wanted, so I really can’t complain.

I had an extra week to work on this one, and it was somehow still not enough. I just couldn’t get properly motivated, nor inspired. I decided, some time after mid-week, that I needed a “random ninja attack” (not literally) to raise the stakes a little. This would pad out the time considerably, and allow me to make more use out of less “content,” and let me relax a little. In the end, I didn’t even get to the combat—the rest was perfectly fine.

The Dinner

I knew there was going to be a lot of exposition here, and I needed a way to keep it from falling into a maelstrom of random questions and answers, or worse, my putting everyone to sleep with droning on for an hour or two. I decided to employ something I had experimented with in Generica (S2E06 and S2E07 tournament stuff, and the “Tour Montage” from S2E09). I’m finding I really need a name for this thing; for now, I’ll call it the “Social Montage.” There are three things I wanted to keep in mind (thanks in great part to Filmento’s review of Minority Report for the reminder):

  1. Make sure there is a clear goal
  2. Keep things moving toward that goal
  3. Put obstacles in the path of that goal

I laid out the knowns and unknowns before we got under way, so everyone had an idea what to ask about. The use of a “combat map” was definitely to make the players a little paranoid about a possible attack, but also to set up proximity that might suggest conversation partners. I broke everything up in turns so the players wouldn’t step all over each other, scheduling the more talkative characters first to give the less talkative ones time to process. I tried to use the NPCs to bring up questions and subjects the players might not have considered, and highlight aspects of their character, while avoiding NPC-to-NPC dialogue (which always feels clunky). (The main NPCs also had their own “goals” for the night.) I set up the “stages” to keep the scene from becoming too “static,” and give a better sense of the passage of time. I wanted to introduce more “obstacles,” but the warning letter was all I could think of at the time—it did help with raising the tension, at least. I really wanted to make the characters “earn” deeper, more important information—another part that could have used a bit more thought. The “lines” themselves were very deliberate, for the most part. For example:

  • Boissonade’s back-and-forth with Inara at the beginning filled in Payne on what he’d missed from the letter (that Artegal burned) and demonstrated Inara’s wit
  • Inara’s question about Read’s lack of a wife was one the PCs likely would never have asked on their own
  • Ulysse’s question about “what to do with the treasure” was meant to prompt the players to think about it—this may be important in the future
  • Demonstrated Ulysse’s seamanship, and Remi’s autism

It did get a bit messy. Some parts occurred out of sequence, or I had put them in the wrong place. I didn’t expect Rogers to go spying on Remi—which I realized afterward should have been an obvious move. I didn’t expect Hayden to “disengage”—I still don’t know what that was about. Afterward, I realized I should have refreshed the knowns/unknowns at the beginning of each stage, as reinforcement and a measure of progress. It would have also been helpful to establish some “personal” objectives for the PCs other than Sir Randel, and have some backup plans for when they inevitably run out of ideas. As with the attempts in Generica, I think this is still a good idea that needs a bit more work to make it truly shine.

The Hunt

Deciding to use The Hunt (Monster Hunters 2 p.4), here, was a very late addition that would likely have been improved if I had thought of it earlier. As with previous iterations, I gathered up the questions—Who, What, When, Where, Why—and figured up their penalties ahead of time per the MH2 criteria, along with assessing the appropriate skills and traits needed for Deductions and clue-gathering. As written, though, it’s a lot of die-rolling. This time, I decided to use the “Take 10” mechanic—assume an average roll of 10, rather than rolling it, and let the clue-bonuses accumulate until the “roll” actually succeeds. When I started, though, I was using the Group Roll concept—which I still need to cover separately at some point—but realized too late that if using the Take 10 mechanic, I could have let them have their individual results instead. (The purpose of the Group Rolls is to reduce laborious and counterproductive die-rolling which was already taken care of.) But the real difficult question for me was whether or not to announce that I was using The Hunt at the beginning, so everyone knows what to do, or hope they get the idea on their own and it develops organically—obviously, I opted for the latter. They’ve got a pretty solid answer for Who and What, now—even before the super-obvious reveal at the end—and some good progress toward the others.

In the end

I could’ve certainly used more time to apply a little more polish (but I know that would have just given me longer to procrastinate, instead). My plan to end with a fight didn’t materialize; I’ll probably use that to kick off the next session instead. Ultimately, though, I feel like my attempt to ramp up the tension was successful. The story moved noticeably forward, and didn’t lag too badly. I gave some answers, that lead to more questions. That’s a good result.

Miscellaneous

  • Claude’s player was out this week, recovering from a surgery, so I took the occasion of his “shyness” at the end of last session to write him out—made things nice and neat. Some of the stuff I had planned for Claude will show up next time, instead, probably.
  • The “snake” was the first time Spenser has seen a “spell effect” with his new abilities, though he doesn’t know what it means
  • I realized just at the reveal that I had the PCs on the wrong side of the fort—the sun needed to come from the West to reflect off whatever-it-was, but they kinda needed to be on the East side to see it properly. Oops 😛
  • The riddle—good or bad—was my own creation; I didn’t crib that from somewhere else
  • Spotting the “meeting on the beach” from the fort was an in-the-moment ass-pull; it might not have happened at all, otherwise—it wasn’t really a “mile” away, though; that was unintentional hyperbole
  • The “Bright Boy” reference from The Howling is right where I wanted to end the session, and a scene I desperately wanted to make happen. Also, this is the first direct contact with a supernatural enemy (that they know of), and the first time Davino’s monster-of-the-week/Hunters “Enemy” has caught up to him in an obvious way.